Summer 2015 Episode Rankings – Week 8

No Gatchaman Crowds Insight this week. It’s a shame it couldn’t have skipped next week instead, so that I wouldn’t have to face a full 20 episodes after I return from Reading! On the plus side, the full Overlord ED got released in time for the long journey~

Long weekends without internet are strange things. No doubt I’ll enjoy myself, and get to do lots of things that I wouldn’t be able to do on my own, half way up a mountain in North Wales… but the lack of connectivity and break in my usual habits is still a shock to the system. 😮

Chamot is still the scariest thing in Rokka no Yuusha. With heroes like that, who needs demon lords!?

I loved how quickly Mikan abandoned her ‘end of world’ panic when given a chance at revenge against Akane!

Moving up:

Much better from Jitsu wa Watashi wa this week! As I mentioned before, early episodes in the series may well have broken my weekly Top 5 with brilliant comedy revolving around the lovably stupid cast’s misunderstandings, if I hadn’t stupidly left it out of my lineup. The series’ mediocre rankings since Week 6 are mostly due to the addition of new character Shiho, and the switch to predictable ecchi fanservice ‘jokes’ she brought with her. Episode 8’s race to save the planet from impending doom by feeding the principal nice chocolate (or torturing her with inedible horrors) was much more my kind of humour, more of that please!

Plot twists in Chaos Dragon: Sekiryu Seneki, as Mashiro suddenly returns from the dead! This isn’t some miracle revival or reversal of the Red Dragon’s ritual though – predictably, she’s a ‘returned one’. Though she seems a lot less zombie-like than the others we’ve met so far, she’s hardly her old self either. But what of Inori, Ibuki’s sister who was also presumed dead? She seems sane enough, if a little sinister, though I get the feeling she might turn out to be an enemy later on. There can only be one King, after all! An enjoyable enough episode, even if the story is a mess by this point. 😛

That kiss, though.

Moving down:

I only seem to end up writing about Durarara!!x2 Ten when it’s moving down… guess there’s not much room for it to move up from its usual #1 spot, and it’d just be my usual praise of the show’s pacing, plot and huge cast anyway. Episode 8, while brilliant, was a huge change in focus from the Dollars and Ruri’s stalker storyline that’s dominated Ten until now. I spent most of the episode trying to figure out who all these new names and characters were, though I doubt we’ll be seeing much more of them now that Izaya and his new private army have dealt with them. This bunch, which includes the ‘child of Saika’ girl, can only mean trouble for everyone else in the episodes to come!

Tough competition and slow pacing are the only reasons Tide-Line Blue is dropping so much, if anything this week’s episode was one of the series’ better ones. Teen and Keel have finally been reunited, but not without some conflict due to their companions Aoi and Joze’s conflicting ideals. Conveniently, since Teen has seen the only satellite map left in existence, he is able to tell Joze where the Dhola Vira is headed, so that they can get back to Gould’s sub. But how will they get from Tibet all the way to France? By stowing away on a floating dock! How could that possibly end badly? 😛 Aoi breaking down over her choice to prioritise her duties as Secretary General over her role as a mother was an unexpected, emotional scene.

Hashiba and Kobayashi’s interactions are cute, if a little predictable and repetitive.

General comments:

I’m still not wowed by Ranpo Kitan: Game of Laplace. Last week’s episode was all over the place, but ended on a promising note with another Twenty Faces murder at a theme park on a private island. An interesting setting, and one with multiple suspects too, in the form of the park’s staff members. It’s just a shame that the real culprit gave in so quickly! Though the visuals remain stylish (and in the case of this mystery, very creepy), the mysteries are just too cliché. At least the second half of the episode was better, with Akechi suddenly becoming talkative about his own past, in which he contributed to the theory that led to his friend creating the first Twenty Faces and the chain that followed.

Ushio to Tora has finally developed a plot, with Ushio setting out in search of his mother, with not a lot of information to go by. For now though, he’s still having to battle monsters of the week en route. This time it was the huge green guy from the OP theme, Fusuma – love his character design, but again he was beaten too easily, and the generic storyline with the girl and her dead pilot father didn’t add much to my enjoyment of the episode. Meh, I don’t watch much shounen. Maybe I’m still expecting every shounen series to be as good as Hunter x Hunter, or the later episodes of Nanatsu no Taizai? Anything to end the shallow episodic stories should be an improvement, at least.

3 Responses to Summer 2015 Episode Rankings – Week 8

I am personally hoping that Ushio and Tora ends up to be a really good shonen.

I’d personally say Shokugeki No Soma is a non-Shonen-like-shonen. The plot isn’t quite as generic, the action scenes are… food… and highly provocative themes… So if you’ve not seen that, there’s a recommendation 😛

Ushio and Tora certainly has potential, but 10 episodes in it’s still following the same formula of beating up some monster of the week to save some innocent human of the week. The interactions between Ushio and Tora have also become a bit repetitive, in my opinion. I’m hoping it’ll pick up in the second half, if and when they reach their destination and we learn more about Ushio’s mother.

Shokugeki no Souma is in my list; it’s only ranked #16 in this post (I tend to prefer eating food to watching it 😛 ), but last week’s episode saw it bounce back up to 9th, thanks to the start of a new tournament. Hopefully it’ll score even higher once we get to the later stages of the election! I’d say it’s more similar to a shounen sports anime than an action series in format.